Texas AG Paxton Says No More Amended Licenses
A memo distributed internally at the Texas Department of Public safety now disallows Texans from using court orders or amended birth certificates to have the gender marker on their license changed. The DPS says the Attorney General’s office is to blame, and what’s more, Attorney General Ken Paxton seems dead set on creating a list of trans Texans again… again. Again.
Opinion by Alyssa Steinsiek
There is transphobia afoot in the state of Texas, shocking absolutely nobody, surely.
According to an internal memo issued to the Texas Department of Public safety on the 20th, Texans can no longer change the sex marker on their driver’s licenses except to amend clerical errors. Sheri Gipson, chief of the Driver License Division at the Texas Department of Public Safety and issuer of the memo, verified this information to Austin outlet KUT News over the phone the next day.
More alarming than that, however, is the fact that the internal memo included instructions to “scan into record” the documents provided by anybody attempting to amend the sex marker on their license, and then forward the applicant’s name and license number to the email address “DLCourtorders@dps.texas.gov,” an email address that looks to have been established solely to house a list of these applicants.
Texans seeking to amend the sex marker on their license using a court order and/or amended birth certificate would be, if it isn’t clear, almost exclusively transgender people.
Late in the day on the 21st, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety issued a statement soundly throwing the Office of the Attorney General under the bus.
“The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) has recently raised concerns regarding the validity of court orders being issued which purport to order state agencies — including DPS — to change the sex of individuals in government records, including driver licenses and birth certificates,” read the unsigned statement, apparently issued after 8 PM on a business day. “Neither DPS nor other government agencies are parties to the proceedings that result in the issuance of these court orders, and the lack of legislative authority and evidentiary standards for the Courts to issue these orders has resulted in the need for a comprehensive legal review by DPS and the OAG. Therefore, as of Aug. 20, 2024, DPS has stopped accepting these court orders as a basis to change sex identification in department records – including driver licenses.”
It’s unclear why the Department of Public Safety feels they have any right to question decisions made by Texas courts regarding the gender of individual Texans, but it’s worth pointing out that this isn’t the first time the OAG, and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in particular, have made moves to put together a list of transgender Texans. In fact, it isn’t even the second or third time Paxton has tried to put together a list of transgender Texans!
The OAG issued an almost identical order to DPS employees in June of 2022, but was informed that “the data requested neither exists nor could be accurately produced” by DPS spokesperson Travis Considine. Worse than that, in 2023 Paxton tried to subpoena out of state clinics in Washington and in Georgia for information regarding Texan patients who may or may not have received gender-affirming care from them after a statewide ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth went into effect.
In each of these cases, Paxton and the OAG have refused to provide any clarification as to why they might want to assemble a list of transgender Texans. Given the blatant shadiness of these internal memos and out of state subpoenas, however, it seems self-evident that Paxton has no good intentions where trans Texans are concerned.
Ian Pittman, an Austin attorney who often represents transgender people, told The Texas Tribune that he’s advising trans Texans to hold off on submitting requests to amend licenses for fear of being targeted by the state. “It will put people on a list that could interfere with their health care,” Pittman told the Tribune, expressing worry that the state may eventually try to expand their ban on healthcare for trans youth to trans adults.
So if you’re trans and in Texas, maybe wait to file that paperwork for now… and if you’re a cis Texan, it’s time for you to start demanding answers about these mysterious lists the OAG is assembling.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a professional writer who spends too much time playing video games!
